Day 4: In Which I find the Mormons of Shanghai

            Well, as you may have guessed from the title of this post, today I braved the metro and worked my way to the expat branch of the LDS church in Shanghai.  Thanks to two very devoted grandfathers, I got the address and pretty comprehensive directions to church. But, because of my keen skill at picking Mormons out of a crowd, I didn’t really have to use them because I just followed another couple.  The branch meets in a conference center of the Yongda International Building which is enormous (I’ll attach a picture later) and is a pretty nice facility for the church to use.  Definitely not your typical Utah meetinghouse.  Within just a few minutes of my arrival, I had already met the relief society presidency and had all their contact information and was sitting with another girl, Helena, who is a student here for the summer.  Everyone was very nice and there was a shocking amount of young families with four or five kids each (the relief society president said the nursery has 17 kids!) which was a total switch from the University 3^rd ward in Seattle, of course.  Overall, church was great and made me feel more at home than anything else I’ve come across here. 

            Then I came back to the motel and discovered a chain of emails about my flying to Beijing tomorrow for rehearsals for our opening ceremony and dinner next weekend and the music program going on at that.  For those of you who don’t know, I’m playing the piano and singing in a choir for this music event, which was part of the deal in my being able to come on this trip.  The original plan was to go to Beijing on Friday night with Evan and James and be there for Saturday and Sunday, but now I get to fly there tomorrow morning and stay Monday-Wednesday, come back to Shanghai and then take the sleeper train back to Beijing on Friday night.  Is this the most practical or efficient solution?  Definitely not.  But I am just going to do what I’m told and get on the flight, hopefully.  I emailed the lady in charge of booking my flight with some questions and she replied saying “Just pay attention to the Hongqiao airport”.  So tomorrow morning you will find me paying attention at the Hongqiao airport, whatever that entails. 

            So, in preparation for tomorrow, James and I braved the “technology mall” to find a local cell phone that I can use tomorrow morning (not my usual Sunday activity, but it had to be done).  This place was CRAZY.  Seriously, there were more computers and cell phones and iPods and iPads than I’ve ever seen in one place and everyone was trying to get you to look at their stuff.  Luckily, we found an English speaker selling cell phones who helped us.  For the phone and sim card the total was 400 RMB.  We probably could have found something cheaper had we been able to communicate perfectly in Chinese, but we figured that if this guy spoke English then we better just buy from him.  And it works well enough so I’m happy.